Adaptive optics system for the Xinglong 2.16 m telescope
Abstract
Adaptive optics (AO) is one of the essential techniques for the large-diameter astronomical telescopes to overcome the wavefront aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence and improve their imaging qualities. This paper describes an adaptive optics system developed for the 2.16-m telescope at Xinglong. This AO system mainly consists of a piezoelectric deformable mirror with 109 actuators, a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with 100 subapertures, and a high-speed control platform based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Experimental results show that this AO system can reduce the root-mean-square (RMS) of the atmospheric wavefront aberrations to, or even smaller than 0.1<italic>λ</italic>, and then the telescope can obtain a near diffraction limited resolution.
